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Last Updated: Jan 12th, 2006 -
10:11:20 |
Imagine a party
that goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 52 weeks a year.
Where friends socialise and exchange photos and gossip, where they
meet up in exotic locations, meet celebrities and even get given
good stuff for free.
This is what Philippine mobile phone
operator Globe Telecom has managed to get underway with its Globe
Girlfriends Club, launched just over a year ago. Members are invited
not just to stay in touch with each other but to get the latest
news, jokes and advice on health or career issues, which all have an
audience of young women in mind.
And it even goes beyond the
virtual world by offering free gifts and discounts from associated
retailers as well as invitations to real-life parties and celebrity
events.
However, Globe, the country's second biggest mobile
phone network operator with over 14 million customers, is not doing
this out of the goodness of its heart. Girlfriends is an incarnation
of a mobile community, a relatively new concept with the power of
not just attracting new customers but keeping them hooked. Since it
introduced the service, Globe has seen a dramatic downturn in churn
rates for members of its Girlfriends Club.
Not to be outdone
- or, more to the point, to avoid losing subscribers - Globe's
larger rival, Philippine mobile network operator Smart (the market
leader with over 21 million subscribers), has launched Addict. This
service offers messaging and chat but also mobile blogging and even
free fizzy drinks to both girls and boys. It too has seen reduced
churn.
The mobile community phenomenon is not just happening
in the Philippines. For example, in North America Boost Hookt from
Sprint subsidiary Boost has gone yet a step further, linking members
with other like-minded people from over 30 countries. At its core is
a virtual dating service where members can meet, interact and take
part in contests and parties. Boost even hosted a competition called
Surfing for Love, in which it flew one male and three female
community members to California for a dating game-style
event.
Bell Canada has deployed a series of mobile community
products over the past four years and enjoyed tremendous success in
reducing churn. Communities have been so successful for the carrier
that it recently decided to make new mobile community, the Blue Bell
Lounge, the anchor product for its new prepay network,
Solo.
'Mobile communities are viral and sticky,' notes
Frederick Ghahramani, director of Vancouver-based mobile communities
developer airG . 'That's just what operators facing strong
competition and high churn rates need.'
There is no
hard-and-fast definition of what constitutes a mobile community but
common components include instant messaging, private chat, public
chat, personal profiles (including text, photos and videos), photo
sharing, SMS groups and mobile blogging. Not all of these have to be
present, however. The exact components and technologies behind them
are secondary, says Ghahramani. The main thing, he says, is people's
attitudes.
A mobile community begins to take shape when a
number of these technologies are brought together under a single
brand, user interface and technology, but it is the congregation of
millions of users that together drive the product, says Ghahramani.
'When a tipping point is reached, the mobile community is
realised.'
Games without frontiers
airG 's route
into mobile communities was through its mobile gaming business. The
same is true for North Carolina company Motricity. Mobile gaming by
definition is a community activity. Add a league table and chat
lounge where gamers can exchange views, tactics and no doubt jibes,
and you have a mobile community.
Motricity's original
audience was young and male, says David Buckley, VP and GM of
Motricity's community services division. Now the gender imbalance is
dissipating and the average age creeping upwards.
'The big
focus of our network operator clients is to reduce churn,' says
Buckley. 'An important element of reducing churn is offering
high-quality services. Communities offer members the ability to
provide feedback about their games experience.'
Buckley says
there is a strong correlation between games ratings and churn - the
higher the ratings the lower the churn. So why aren't we seeing much
in the way of mobile communities in the UK?
Churn has always
been a major problem here, with operators keen to inform investors
about improvements to churn rates and even keener not to talk about
the subject when things aren't going so well. Recently, both O2 and
Orange have run high-profile campaigns just to reduce their churn
rates. And it has now become commonplace to be offered deals for
being a loyal customer including money back on money
spent.
O2's marketing director, Russ Shaw, recently made a
point of the issue, stating that if customers did not bond with a
business then that business was missing a huge trick. 'The mobile
business needs to shift its thinking and take a long look at the
economics of business and customer satisfaction,' he said.
So surely now must be the ideal time to invest wholesale in
the mobile communities concept?
Olly Topley, VP of strategic
marketing at mobile entertainment application developer Freever,
Europe's most successful proponent of mobile communities, believes
one of the reasons UK operators have been slow to step aboard the
mobile communities bandwagon is that they are 'a bit in denial'
about their need to cultivate young people. 'It's a cliché but it's
true: young people are the future. This is a lesson that has been
learnt in other markets such as the Philippines some time ago,' he
says.
But, Topley notes, the UK also faces other types of
constraints. An industry code of conduct, for example, requires that
communications are moderated unless participants can prove they are
adults. UK operators actively discourage people from meeting and,
says Topley, 'Dating is a definitely no-go area if there is any
chance minors may be able to access the service.'
He adds
that at a technology level, the UK has tended to concentrate on
services based on SMS rather than more interactive - and therefore
livelier and more appealing - formats such as Wap and Java. When UK
operators have tested the waters with mobile community-like
services, they have been poor at promoting them. 'Where we see them
promote services we see more activity,' says Topley.
Recent
live chats with Tony Blair and pop band Feeder, for example, proved
very popular. 'We will see more of these,' Topley predicts. In the
end, however, he forecasts that it may not be the UK's conventional
operators that lead the way with mobile communities but its virtual
operators. 'MVNOs [such as Virgin or Fresh] may be the people who
actually go out and pioneer,' he notes.
Avoiding the
issue
There may even be an argument to be made that the UK's
mobile phone operators may have a vested interest in not supporting
mobile communities. They could rob income from the operators' very
profitable SMS services and open them up to criticisms of being
careless with issues of personal and even national security, says
James Pearce, chief technical officer of UK-based quality monitoring
platform developer Argogroup.
Core mobile community
technologies such as instant messaging or chat generate a lot of
traffic. According to messaging company Followap, the average
European SMS user generates 30 messages a month, the average instant
messaging user between 30 and 50 and the average chat participant
over 100. Rather than see this as an opportunity, it could be
tempting to some within the network operators to see this as a
threat, an erosion of a very profitable SMS business, says
Pearce.
Then there is the age-old issue of operators wanting
to control what goes over their networks. The usual metaphor used to
describe this is that of a walled garden. The higher the wall, the
less open and more proprietary the approach; the lower the wall, the
more open and similar to the relative anarchy of the fixed
internet.
'3 is more walled than anyone else, T-Mobile less
and everyone else somewhere in between,' says Pearce. Similar
patterns are likely to emerge with mobile communities, he says, but
this too may be a problem when it comes to developing successful
mobile communities.
While mobile communities in some markets
have grown very successfully under the umbrella of a network
operator, Pearce's gut feeling is that in the UK they may need to be
more alternative. 'Mobile communities are likely to be more
successful if they are left-field, even anti-establishment,' says
Pearce. Pointing to the most successful blogs on the traditional
web, he believes they are more likely to be more about 'self
journalism - the little man standing up and saying, this is my view
of the world' than selling shoes or music downloads.
'Being
tied to one network operator could be a turn-off for this kind of
user,' says Pearce. This could make it more difficult for an
operator to see the benefits of mobile communities. The last thing
UK operators want is to hasten their demise from service providers
to mere information conduits. Nevertheless, there have already been
the first tentative steps in this direction. The launch of O2's
personal web pages may be the beginning of mobile blogging culture
to mirror that of the web. And Nokia recently announced software for
its phones that allows mobile blogging.
Time may be running
out for the UK's major mobile phone network operators to decide on
their mobile communities strategy. If they do not seize the
initiative soon, it may be taken from them.
© Copyright 2006 : Noble House
Media Ltd
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